Headphone Elegies

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In March of this year, the writer Steve Almond penned a brief article in the LA Times waxing nostalgic about the 70s, when listening to music was an “activity in and of itself… and not just another channel on our ever-expanding dial of distractions.” Almond attributes this evolution of our listening habits to the usual suspects, namely technology and the devices and software that fall under the iPod/iTunes umbrella. Because music listening, says Almond, has become less a “concerted sonic and emotional event” and more a pragmatic function of our increasingly digital lifestyles, we as a music listening culture are missing out on opportunities for a sacred and spiritual interaction with our music. For sure, Mr. Almond is right to say that our relationship with music has been profoundly influenced by taking our music out of the living room, away from the stationary turntable and component stereo system, and inserting it into nearly every activity and event of our days. However, it’s grossly inaccurate to dismiss this impact as sacrilegious or impoverishing when what technology has in fact done for us as a music listening culture is quite positive, something close to liberating, and dangerously powerful.

Track 01: “Take Pills” by Panda Bear

While the methods by which we now acquire our music have had an impact, to a degree, on our experience of music listening, they have remained markedly less influential than the evolutions in the design and application of what we use to listen to our music. In 2008 and 2009, close to 100 million iPods were purchased globally. The widespread use of personal mp3 players and, more importantly, the headphones attached to those players, have gone on to facilitate for a significant percentage of the population a kind of relationship that has never before occurred between music listener and music.

Join the public space and look around: It takes only a brief moment to locate an individual plugged in and headphoned up. Like using an umbrella, headphones serve a particular function, shielding us from the nuisances of the world. Hop on any form of public transportation, plug in, and no longer must you suffer the coughing, sneezing, dry throat clearing, cell phone texting, loud speaker announcing, sneaker squeaking, nervous leg tapping, neighbor yawning, Doritos eating, water bottle dropping and newspaper shuffling that is the shuttle, train, or bus around you. Step off and into the street and headphones continue to serve you well. Why subject yourself to the car honking, police whistle blowing and sidewalk chattering of the urban space when you don’t have to?

Headphones though have a function superior to being simply a buffer to keep out the annoyances of the modern world. They quickly and conveniently facilitate our music listening habit, an activity with a potent high. As the neurologist Oliver Sacks says of music, it can call to both parts of our basic nature—the emotional and intellectual. (Throw in physical satisfaction and music might be the perfect mate.) If you’re in search of a superficial engagement, you can find a basic emotional solace at the threshold of a song’s sound; take it in at its surface level and feel satisfied with the instrumental performance and/or the tonal qualities of the words sung or spoken. Listen deeper—to the song’s narrative, meaning, and themes—and you will locate the ideas and concepts that provide the intellectual stimulation Sacks speaks of. If you allow it, music can strike you in the heart as well as in the head. But any music fan knew this already.

Track 03: “We Will Never Die” by Bon Iver

The result of having taken this emotionally and intellectually stimulating habit on the road, away from the home stereo and into everywhere, is that we have become Hollywood directors soundtrack-editing in real time the films of our lives. Maybe we can’t chop out a tedious 45-minute bus commute from our day, but with the addition of our favorite albums or playlists we can certainly make it speak to us in powerful ways. With the right soundtrack, a movie director can heighten tension, add irony, or inject a scene with some deeper meaning. With our headphones on, we become directors who can enrich even the most boring activities of our lives with provoking music. Think, for example, of a hypothetical Charlie buying fruit in the produce aisle while he listens to Talking Heads “This Must Be The Place.”

He works through the bins of fruit, he’s squeezing oranges, and his mind wanders: I am buying these oranges, my fiancé will eat one while standing in our apartment kitchen, the apartment that we live in, the apartment that we call home, in the community that we call our own; a community with supermarkets like this one, with offices nearby, offices like mine, where I earn a salary that affords me things like an apartment and oranges and… With headphones on and the right song playing, Charlie’s banal produce experience becomes, depending on his receptivity to sentimental thoughts, a fertile stream of ideas and emotions about his concepts of home, family, and community. If present, willing, and plugged in, we like Charlie can influence the emotional and intellectual tenor of our public moments of solitude. We are no longer subject, for example, to the soul numbing commercial ambiance of a supermarket—of what Delillo described in White Noise as “toneless systems” and a “dull unlocatable roar.” Instead, we inject into our shopping experiences and mundane errands evocations of our strongest felt memories, relationships, and wants.

Track 04: “Pink Stones” by Memory Tapes

Headphones liberate us from being distracted by the thumping sonic assault of corporate businesses and the audio debris broadcast by others in the public space. (Both are on display in their worst ways at chain fitness gyms: The loudspeaker announcements for hybrid pilate-mixed martial arts-yoga-spin classes showering down over a roomful of grunting, heaving, chatting neighbors.) When we facilitate our liberation, wherever we are, we gain a particular brand of insight into ourselves. The French scholar Michel de Certeau observes a similar gain of perspicacity when we travel on a train. He proposes that when we are behind a train window and observe landscapes of almost blurry trees, buildings, and chunks of towns, we are seeing and moving through familiar things but yet remain totally separated from them. It’s a bit of a paradox—to be removed from something while being immersed in it at the same time—but this is a process we undertake more often than we think, especially when we use our memories. For example, when we think back and remember our high school graduation, we are not there anymore, in the stuffy summer auditorium or under the buggy football stadium lights, but our minds move us through the distant memories just as if we were. When we travel on a train, what’s far away seems strange in the same way as when we think of our high school friends at graduation, those odd and younger versions of the adults we might not now recognize, warped by the velocity of so many years. Likewise, from behind a train window, trees lose their leaf-edge detail, street lamps and parked cars appear as quickly as they vanish. And in this magician’s trick of speed and sleight of movement, fences, trees, and cars become shadow objects, provoking and echoing objects from our memories, dreams, and secrets. Moving quickly along the railway, always away from these shadow objects, we see briefly vague hints of what we normally furnish our mind with and this estrangement from our own internal mental horizon puts us into a meditative mood of speculative thinking. De Certeau cleverly terms this as “losing one’s footing” from the reality around us and something quite similar happens to us when we plug into our mp3 players and tune out.

Track 05: “Here Come De Honey Man” by Clark Terry

Headphones, like the train window, create a distance between us and that which is around us. The music in this case acts like the train itself, propelling us forward, moving us through that which we are no longer a part of. We walk along a crowded city sidewalk, participate in the dense humanity as it throbs up and down the street, but are oblivious to the sounds that populate such a scene because our ears are plugged up. It’s as if the train’s two-dimensional windowpane has gone 3-D, enveloping us in a glass box of music, a pope-mobile like protection from the audio infiltrations of the city space. The music, in this way, takes us somewhere else. We are relieved from our position as a member of the dense humanity and we are able to view it, and our place within it, from somewhere else. This death of the present moment is, as De Certeau says, “necessary for the birth, outside of these things but not without them, of unknown landscapes and the strange fables of our private stories.” We again become the movie directors of the films of our lives, except now we have a script: The New York city street we walk is reappropriated for our personal fantasies of narrative; the silent others around us become the film extras, the characters of our memories become the stars, and we, for once, get to say action and cut.

Track 06: “Building Steam with A Grain of Salt” by DJ Shadow

The ultimate effect of having quick and frequent access to private moments during which we can meditate on our memories and ideas—even while in the public space—is that we develop a better and richer understanding of ourselves (if we’re receptive to it). This occurs in large part because our memories and ideas undergo a modulation each time they are put to use. For example, when we read a headline about Michael Jackson dangling his baby over a railing, our ideas about a whole litany of things change. Our understanding about Father, Baby, Dangling, Child Care, Bizarre, Celebrity, Career Train Wreaks, and every other simple component of that story about MJ getting weird takes on a new shape. This is precisely what is going on when we’re listening attentively to emotionally and intellectually stimulating music. When we tune in, we call upon ideas and memories in our minds—let’s say three weeks ago via some song in particular, and then again a few days ago with that same song—and we gain a new perspective on whatever it is that song provokes within us. Why? Because we have a “then and now” to compare and contrast. Even if a song evokes a very particular memory, a tune that reminds us of a cruise ship vacation, for example, we will inevitably think of that vacation differently if only in the slightest way when viewed through the music-filtered perspective of three weeks ago versus a few days ago. Because we can never be in precisely the same mindset at two different times—there are always subtle if not significant differences in what is floating around in our heads at any given moment—we gain two different points of view on the memory of that cruise ship vacation, just like how we had a before and after perspective on the idea of Celebrity Children before and after reading about Michael Jackson and the baby. Music, in this way, serves us like a personalized Lucky Google search of our internal inventories, digging up rare or popular gems from the archives of our lives. By creating moments pregnant for improving our understanding of ourselves, we essentially gain an opportunity for a better understanding of the world as well.

Track 07: “Anywhere Anyone” by Dntel

Up to this point, my focus has been on the advances in technology that have afforded us the ability to bring our music with us wherever we can carry along our phones or mp3 players. It’s important to note though that there’s another kind of technological portability that has been almost as influential on our music listening habits: Playlists. In the move away from artist and label determined track sequences towards complete user control, the modern music listener has taken over as the primary music curator, able to move songs around at will. The tracks I used to title these sections, for example, were plucked from a playlist of songs I can write to (playlist title: “Songs w/ Little Words”). Most of these tracks are from albums I enjoy immensely in their originally intended track sequences. However, I have also found value in re-contextualizing these songs into new arrangements with other selections of my choice.

10 years ago, this sort of playlist creation was clumsy and slow, requiring cassette tapes or the still emerging mix CDs and burn software. Because of torrent sites, high speed internet, and the mp3’s victory as the format of choice, mp3 player technology has had to keep pace; now, nearly anyone can become a music curator, selecting tracks from various artists, genres, and time periods to create playlists and portable music libraries that are unique and incredibly personal. In taking charge of the order in which we arrange our music, we develop a more vested interest in our music. Like a renter who becomes a home owner, we care about the small details: the opening song as a first impression, the transition between tracks, the playlist title that probably no one else cares about. We become not just curators of music but curators of connections, evaluating not simply songs or albums on their own terms but also how albums and songs relate to one another. In making playlists, we come to understand our music in a more sophisticated way.

“Golden” by High Places

With so many options for control and power over our music, we run the risk of falling prey to a fantasy of what Baudrillard calls “potentialitites linked to usage.” Instead of employing our music and mp3 players as conduits to our “psychological” sanctuaries, we fascinate ourselves with the mechanics of music curating. Baurillard was originally speaking about cars but his ideas are also applicable to our relationship with current music technology. It is here that Steve Almond’s concerns about the impoverishment of our listening habits have the potential for genuine applicability. If we allow ourselves to become less concerned with an emotional and intellectual engagement to our music and more occupied with the “mastery, control, and command, an optimalization of the play of possibilities” offered by the music technology we tether ourselves to on a daily basis, then we will have lost out on having any sort of deep connection with the music itself.

The potential for missed connections multiply as the technology becomes more advanced and the appeal of mastering such sophistication looms over us. “Each person,” Baudrillard points out, “could see himself at the control of a hypothetical machine” capable of launching himself like an astronaut into mental space, far from his place of origin. We’re quite familiar with these space cadets. They are the members of the global Audio Visual club: TechoNauts who camp out in front of Apple Stores for days and nights, awaiting the next generation iPhone. Products of their environment and causalities of our upgrade culture, TecnhoNauts monitor the controls of their technology with such vigor that they find themselves separated from the world around them, divided from the public space by nearly becoming the interface of their preferred gadgetry. Their speaker wire costs as much as a new set of tires; their digital music files are nearly perfect copies of the master pressings; they are perpetually in search of purity. Instead of looking through the prism of music into the interior landscape of their memories and minds, TechnoNauts look only at the potential of the prism. From their perspective, it is less important to have a song to turn to when feeling down than being able to have access to that song, with the best equipment possible, in every scenario imaginable.

Track 09: “Collapsing At Your Doorstep” by Air France

If religion is the smooth opiate for the masses, then music is our pharmaceutical grade stimulant. Wittgenstein argues that language itself can never illustrate the essence of meaning, it can only point towards it. Music, here, achieves language’s grand project: To show and not tell what being a human being is all about. Music provokes and informs our thoughts without ever taking their form. Music can, in its own unique way, evoke emotion and challenge ideas burrowed deep in the seas of our minds. We have technology that makes this excavation of our inner landscapes easier than it once was. The potential for abusing this technology is great, but so is the payoff for using it right. As Schopenhauer says, music has the high value of being the panacea of all our sorrows. Never is music best used as a sedative—it performs at the highest level when it offers us insight, stimulating and shaking up our inner beings so that we can better understand each other.

Sean Patrick Cooper
is the author of a novella that’s not quite done, “If Only We Were Here To Stay.” His work on music, culture, and art is forthcoming, ideally, from multiple locations. He is the recipient of the James Suydam Prize and Evelyn Hamilton Award and is online at www.seanpatrickcooper.com.

1.RJ Smith doesn’t draw an exact line marking when James Brown, the 5’6” son of a South Carolina turpentine maker, became James Brown, Sex Machine/Black Elvis/Mr. Please, Please, Please/etc. But I will.
It happens about a third of the way through Smith’s remarkable new book, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown. Brown’s smash album, Live at the Apollo, has just spent 66 weeks on the pop charts, vaulting the performer from the sweaty dives of the chitlin’ circuit into a higher, neon-lit level of exposure. Money is pouring in fast enough for Brown to buy a mansion in Queens with a moat, and, after $65,000 in renovations, an interior lined with faux leather and pictures of himself. The singer has renovated his body, too. He pays a California dentist to fix the gap between his teeth and hires a traveling hairstylist to whirl his hair into shining bouffant praised, in the slang of the time, as “expoobident.”
Meanwhile, Brown’s tour is becoming more militaristic. He hires goons to clear the way to and from shows. Onstage, he fines his musicians for missed notes or wrinkled uniforms. Offstage, he is armed and ready. “You notice how many pictures of James Brown, he’s got a coat over his arm?” the Rev. Al Sharpton asks, in the book. “That’s because he had his gun under it.”
Most importantly, Brown is leaving behind blues, rock, doo-wop, and gospel in favor of a raw sound filled with screams, popping bass, and furious counter-rhythms. He is inventing the genre we currently refer to as “funk.” Smith describes the singer’s February 1965 stop in at a converted barn in Charlotte, N.C., where a control booth sits in the old hayloft. “It was time to record a tricky piece of rhythm Brown had been thinking about for a while,” he writes:
The musicians set up, playing this and that while waiting for the boss to arrive. Finally, Brown’s customized white Cadillac with the tinted windows appeared, and the singer swaggered in. “He stopped the place. You just knew that somebody of significance was present,” said Clay Smith, Arthur’s [the owner of the studio] boy. Constantly in motion and talking so fast he could have used a translator, Brown was not one of the guys. “James was in charge,” Arthur Smith remembered later. “I knew I owned the studio, but I knew he was going to do what he wanted to there.”
What Brown wanted to do was lay down a strutting, macho anthem marked by explosions of brass and a guitar that sounds like chrome wheels spinning. He hums a melody to the sax player and a bass line to the bassist. He thumps out a beat for the drummer. He watches a trumpet player struggle, fires him, then re-hires him moments later. And when the singer is ready, he screams out a set of lyrics scratched on a sheet of paper. The song is called “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”
“Keep on Fighting” is the title of the chapter in which all of this takes place. And no matter how many superhero movies you have seen, the transformation it describes is exhilarating. Like Bruce Wayne becoming Batman or Clark Kent becoming Superman, we have just watched James Brown become Soul Brother Number One.
2.
A former Los Angeles magazine editor and contributor to Blender, Spin, and The Village Voice, Smith is not the flashiest, most purely talented writer to take on the Godfather of Soul. That title, I believe, goes to Jonathan Lethem for his dazzling 2006 Rolling Stone profile, “Being James Brown.” (More on that in a minute.) In the beginning of The One, Smith struggles slightly to find the tone to tell this story. Some of his images fall flat, like when he writes that the chord structure of “Cold Sweat” was “as visionary and protean as Frida Kahlo’s one eyebrow.” At other times, his voice cracks when he reaches beyond his natural range. His description of the “lachrymose mood” of Brown’s early ballad “Try Me” feels over-academic for a performer as lusty and physical as Brown. Elsewhere, Smith sounds uncomfortably un-academic. After a street fight with estranged band members early in his career, Smith ventures inside Brown’s head. “At least them motherfuckers weren’t gonna be calling him Monk Brown to his face anymore,” he writes, in an ill-advised estimation of J.B.’s inner monologue.
As a funk nerd (an oxymoron, but still true), I have other quibbles with the book. I would have liked to learn more about the nine children Brown fathered with nearly as many mothers. We see them playing Monopoly with real money during one scene, then suing for royalties later on, and that’s about it. I would have also relished a glimpse or two more inside the marathon, early-'70s recording sessions that produced “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing,” “Mind Power,” and other predecessors of modern hip-hop.
But, it would be unfair to judge Smith’s book on a few slip-ups, especially when the majority of the book feels so good. Like his subject, Smith is man of stamina and drive. The fruits of his prodigious reporting are evident on every page: a secret tape of Richard Nixon whining “I don’t want any more blacks, and I don’t want any more Jews, between now and the election,” before a visit from Brown at the White House; a heartwrenching moment when Brown’s guitarist, Jimmy Nolen, asks his wife to pass on a message to Brown after Nolen’s death. “'The next person you get to work for you,' the wife dutifully reports to The Godfather, ‘I hope you treat them better than you did us.’”
These facts and details provide a driving, powerful rhythm for the book, and, over time, the story seeps into your bones. In a scene that is jarringly reminiscent of the first chapter of Ralph Ellison’sInvisible Man, we learn that, as a young man in Augusta, Ga., Brown was blindfolded and thrust into a boxing ring for a “battle royal,” while wealthy white men smoked cigars and looked on. Later in Brown’s career, we learn that country musicians in Nashville recorded a white-response to “Say it Loud -- I’m Black and I’m Proud” with the lyrics, “I’m proud and I’m white with a song to sing...” We are also there inside Brown’s Learjet when the engine stalls and the plane begins to drop precipitously. After the engines kick back in, Brown calmly turned to an acquaintance and asks if he was scared. When the man says, “Yes,” Brown responds, “It’s not your time. You with me.”
Smith’s reporting is never better than his account of the singer’s 1967 trip to perform for troops in Vietnam. From the USO press release describing “primitive and somewhat savage” beat of Brown’s music to a walkie-talkie squawking, “Get 'em out of there, there’s a mortar attack coming in” as the band traveled between shows, we are not simply reading, anymore. We are being hauled across time and space to an amphitheatre carved out of a hillside east of Saigon:
At the end of a song, from behind the stage, the musicians suddenly heard the unmistakable ack-ack-ack of American guns firing on VC to the rear. Everybody was watching the band, and now they were really watching, as confusion and then anxiety played across the musicians’ faces. Finally, one of the guys sitting cross-legged at the front of the stage spoke to the band: “Aw, don’t worry. We won’t let Charlie get ya!” And then Brown took the microphone and continued the show: “Hit me!”
Indeed, it Smith’s dogged research that leads to the book’s greatest achievement. James Brown was a man who went to extreme lengths to conceal any signs of weakness. The author includes plenty of examples of this -- going back on tour the day after his son Teddy’s funeral, for example -- but he also provides access to the man during rare moments of distress. We watch Brown nearly knock out his teeth as he learns the tip-the-mic-drop-to-a-split-then-bounce-back-catch-the-mic trick that would later appear effortless. As his grip on the singles charts weakens in the late 1970s, we see him tell his trombonist, Fred Wesley, to write knockoffs of other artists’ hits, like David Bowie’s “Fame.” (This was “a head-scratcher,” Smith writes, “because ‘Fame’ itself is a pale version of Brown’s 1970s sound.”) And when the IRS comes searching for millions in unpaid taxes we watch the collision of Brown’s colossal ego with one of the few forces strong enough to tame it. With the government threatening to throw a padlock on his mansion, Brown summons his accountant, Fred Daviss, to downtown Augusta one night, where they sit quietly in the singer’s van. His hair was tousled. He was sweating. “Finally, he reached under the seat and pulled out a sack of money, like he was extracting a molar,” Smith writes. “'Hold on to it as long as you can,' he told Daviss, 'But then pay 'em.'”
3.
“Someday, someone will write a great biography of James Brown,” Lethem wrote in Rolling Stone in 2006. “It will by necessity, though, be more than a biography. It will be the history of a half-century of the contradictions and tragedies embodied in the fate of African Americans in the New World; it will be a parable, even of the contradictions of the individual in the capitalist society, portentous as that may sound.”
Smith has written such a book: a clear, linear, trustworthy account of one of the most complex and influential musicians in American history. His biography upholds the mystique of a man whom characters in the book call “black messiah,” “the personification of Blackness,” “the ultimate god of funk,” a man with “more musical genius than Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart put together,” and, in the case of a disgruntled former drummer, “a black Hitler.” At the same time, it gamely steers through the cloud of myth and misinformation that Lethem identified as “The James Brown Zone of Confusion,” and returns the singer back to earth.
Toward the end of Brown’s life, the author ushers readers into a new James Brown Zone of Confusion -- one based entirely in reality. The elderly Brown’s life was marked, on one hand, by laurels from the Kennedy Center and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and, on the other, ever-stranger behavior due to drug abuse. The collision of these two worlds, as Smith reports, was often surreal. At one point Brown gets a young Wall Street investment banker to secure a $30 million loan against his future music royalties. When they meet each other to finalize the deal, Brown asks the startled banker, “You ever smoke gorilla [PCP]?”
All of this is not to say that The One is the “definitive biography of James Brown,” as the book’s promotional copy reads. Such a book will never exist. Smith’s book is not a substitute for Fred Wesley’s indispensable, Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Sideman or many of the pieces (including Lethem’s) in 2008’s The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul. “Entire forests have been decimated to build the newsprint mountain that recounts his exploits, declarations, and influence,” wrote Nelson George in the introduction to that anthology. The term “definitive” attempts to seal off a man whose music, if not his heart, still thumps on.
On vinyl, on YouTube, and in the musical DNA of countless current performers, James Brown lives for a new generation of writers like me, who want to drop to the floor in splits; to dance, scream, and sweat, in his honor. RJ Smith has perhaps gone further than any writer before in telling this man’s story, but his book is not definitive. It is merely expoobident.
Image Credit: Wikipedia

Jonathan Richman, along with his long-time drummer Tommy Larkins, took the stage, strummed his acoustic guitar and began to sing. Nothing. The mikes weren't working. Where other performers, and indeed lesser legends, might have turned diva, Jonathan simply announced - loudly, to make up for the microphone - that he and the techies would confer for a few minutes, sort out the problem, then the show would go on. Nothing to get uptight about. It was all very casual and friendly.True to his word, he returned to the stage a few minutes later and tried again. Still nothing. And where the diva might have stormed off, Jonathan simply walked to the side, and with clear, unmiked guitar and his best project-to-the-back-of-the-room voice, he began to sing.The audience in the sweltering hall seemed to make the extra effort to keep quiet, almost leaning in so as not to miss anything, and Jonathan responded by singing loud and clear. It was the best "show-must-go-on" moment I've ever experienced. Ten minutes later, the mikes began working. For me, the magic of those few unamplified moments set the tone for a glorious evening.This was the second time I'd seen Jonathan Richman over the past decade, and each time it's like a visit from an old friend, albeit one who plays killer Spanish guitar and seems to have an extraordinary facility with languages. Worldliness aside, his are the most personal of shows, full of joy, optimism, wonder and romance. But also songs of caution, imploring us in his own way not to get too caught up in technology.Early Modern Lovers songs like "Pablo Picasso" take on a new life in this setting, and sit comfortably amid later fare like "In Che Mondo Viviamo". One minute he's swiveling and gyrating through "I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar", the next he's singing songs about cell phones and the demise of human interaction.The truest of troubadours, Jonathan Richman goes from town to town sharing his latest musical offerings, his latest stories, letting us into his world for a couple of hours while he serenades us in the most intimate of settings.

5 comments:

This is wonderful. It also makes me think of how home recording and the portability of music have affected the creative process for musicians. When I saw that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song up there, I remembered an interview where Alec Ounsworth said he would burn the band’s demos to a CD-R and walk for miles with his discman, writing lyrics and rearranging the songs in his head. You can’t have that relationship with the music in a traditional studio setting or without the ability to take the music with you. In the same way, Jeff Tweedy drives around Chicago listening to Wilco demos, writing lyrics and taking mental notes about the recording. To think of songwriting as less stationary is pretty exciting to me. Like John Wray writing Lowboy on the subway. Kind of…?

There’s always this excuse from artists/musicians that a song must be heard in its original context (the album), but I think that’s bullshit. I’m reminded of Jonathan Lethem’s “Ecstasy of Influence” essay; why control the way a person is engaged with something? There’s nothing better than the singular experience of crafting a bitchin’ playlist.

@ Christian: that’s an interesting point. I wonder now how many other artists have used technology to craft their art in new ways. I’d imagine the advancements in tech facilitate more opportunities for artists to find the intersection between their creativity and the world around them.

@ Justin: Totally agree, and I think Lethem would too. There’s something to be said for consuming creatively, and for a killer playlist.

Like this piece. Thanks for adding me on Facebook. I like to write but have not spent the time to invest myself in it enough. Music is a very big part of my life and I really like what you did with this in your article. Playlists guide my heart and take me from my pains.

It’s like a heartbeat, the opening bars of Arcade Fire’s “Reflektor” – the first song in the Canadian band’s new project, the one that sets the tone and the refrain: “It’s a reflection.” It’s the thirteenth song if you count backwards, the bridge between the two halves of the double album. It’s the mirror. My pulse quickens. I am alive. “We fell in love, alone on a stage / In the reflective age.” I am not alone here. I wait for it, the rhyme in the second stanza between the French and the English. This is the sublime: “Entre la nuit, la nuit et l'aurore. / Entre les royaumes, des vivants et des morts. / If this is heaven / I don't know what it's for / If I can't find you there / I don't care” (Between the night, the night and the dawn. / Between the realms, of the living and the dead). I drink the pairing of “morts” and “for” – I am giddily outside myself and deep in the beauty of the bond, if for a moment, between the two languages, the dead (“morts”) and the preposition of the future (“for”) – which in the fifth stanza transforms into the exquisite almost overlap of “morts” and “more.” I am free of the anxiety of not writing.
I love that this song is about trying to find “a way to enter” – to find a portal, a connector – which one can read as the passage to the Underworld that Orpheus seeks in order to attempt his rescue of Eurydice (there are two tracks in Reflektor that make this theme clear, one named for each ancient Greek figure). I also read the song as seeking the throughway for creativity, for getting on with the act of making something. But “Reflektor” does not promise safe passage: “I thought, I found a way to enter/...I thought, I found the connector.” But I didn’t. Even the false promise is assuring. I want to look for my entry onto the page, into a line, an image, a something. I am afraid. I am in the middle of a rough descent, choppy in the air and in need of a pocket of smooth, a glide. The seven-plus-minute “Reflektor” has become a ritual these days. Blast it louder and maybe the portal will appear. Will I dive in?
I am dancing in the backyard under the Brazilian pepper tree, the almost full moon keeping me company. But my movements are small, so I go inside, into the room where I work at my computer, and I dance around the desk – I turn up the music and it pulses through the wires into my ears – I am still too timid to blast the notes into the nakedness of night, or morning, the way I did when I was a teenager in my attic bedroom, or in college away from family and anything familiar. My new roommates knew what the Bjork loop meant. A litany of song to lift another day. Then I moved onto Radiohead. Then the Chilean hip hop band Tiro de Gracia and their first album Ser Humano (human being/to be human).
Many writers, those attempting to write, like to talk about what helps them get in the mood, the zone. The organization of the objects on the desk, a particular pen or writing machine, the ritual reading of a specific text, a stack of books at the ready, music playing in the background. Maybe it’s not working and everything must be reversed: no music, no books, no wireless connection, no flesh and blood people nearby, no. I am pulled in by pairings, duets, correspondences. Elizabeth Bishop’s letters to Robert Lowell and his replies, Virginia Woolf’sOrlando doubled as male and female, Maria Bethânia’s covers of Vinicius de Moraes’s songs in the album Que falta você me faz (how I miss you, or, more literally, what an absence you do to me).
But beware! The guide to the portal of creativity could be unreliable, even dangerous. When I started to read the work of Clarice Lispector, I took in one book after another, after another – I became immersed in the modes of her tragic heroines, their epiphanies seismic, but rarely conduits to change. I needed an epiphany in my own life. Lispector, and Bishop, hurled me to Brazil – that was the portal, for a time. Then a Brazilian scholar of Fernando Pessoa warned me that those who study the Portuguese poet put themselves at risk of uncanny episodes, darkness that cannot be returned, not least of all in The Book of Disquiet. Home again, Wallace Stevens hypnotized me out of writing. James Merrill and his Ouija board made me nervous.
I mishear lyrics and when I realize that I am wrong, I keep singing them that way, an incantation gone slant, a twist that might do the trick. “Reflektor” begins: “Trapped in a prism, in a prism of light.” Over and over I sing: “Trapped in a prison, in a prison of love.” Is there a difference? My favorite misunderstanding lies in the middle of the song, the repeated refrain: “Just a reflection, of a reflection / Of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection / Will I see you on the other side? (Just a Reflektor) / We all got things to hide (Just a Reflektor).” And always, always, I sing in the spirit of how the phrase sounds when its iterations are layered on top of one another: “Just a reflection of of affection / of of affection / of of affection.” I am consistent, at least, in the theme of my misreading.
What kind of love is this? Who is the “you” sung to? “If this is heaven / I need something more / Just a place to be alone / 'Cause you're my home.” If it is Orpheus, then Eurydice is the recipient of song; or, vice versa. If I am the one to sing, then it’s the person or the thing, the book or the phrase, that will help me find the portal, dare me to dive in, to begin. In “Then Ends Where Now Begins” – an essay in the stunning collection Eros the Bittersweet – Anne Carson writes: “For Sokrates, the moment when eros begins is a glimpse of the immortal ‘beginning’ that is a soul.”
I am still here, now sitting at my desk, earbuds pressed into my ears. I have listened to the song too many times to say. Nothing yet. Let’s play again. I stand up to dance. I remember my Chinese teacher who made us do jumping jacks while counting to eight in unison. That’s what I remember, always eight, infinity: 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 She also told us that we had to be friends with our Chinese characters, spend time with them, talk to them, love them. Only then would they love us back, be there for us when we might need them instead of hiding in the silence. I begin a series of jumping jacks and they morph quickly, by number three, into something else all together. I shake my fists, I stretch my arms, I pull at the air above me. It seems that I am here now, I have fallen, I have entered. “Will I see you on the other side?”

Compare:
I want to run, I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside
I want to reach out and touch the flame
Where the streets have no name.
(U2, “Where the Streets Have No Name”)
Way down South they gave a jubilee
Them Georgia folks they had a jamboree
They’re drinking home brew from a wooden cup
The folks dancing there got all shook up.
(Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”)
Now, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and because I'm one myself I know how devoted rock and roll fans are to their favorite bands, but it must be seen that compared to the Chuck Berry lyric, the U2 lyric is, well, shit. I say this as a fervent admirer of U2 and one who was lucky enough to witness the band perform “Where the Streets Have No Name” in 1987 or so, when to hear it for the first time was to be swept up in a tide of communal idealism. Who could argue with such lofty sentiments, especially when accompanied by the surge of the Edge’s ringing guitar and the most propulsive rhythm section in all of rock? Alas, there isn’t a word, phrase, or image in the whole song not utterly staled by cliché. As in much of the best rock and roll, the majesty of the music disguises the triteness of the lyrics.
There’s no triteness to be disguised in “Rock and Roll Music.” It is what “Where the Streets Have No Name” manifestly is not: poetry, or at least a variety of folk poetry that delights in language and its own expressiveness. Not that “Rock and Roll Music” will ever be mistaken for “Sailing to Byzantium” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In the first place, it’s a song, with lyrics not intended to be experienced apart from the music. Secondly, it derives from and relates to pop culture, not high art; as he cheerfully admits in his Autobiography, Chuck Berry has read a total of six books in his life. Yet who would disdain the wit and ingenuity of a typical Chuck Berry lyric merely because it lacks the density of Yeats’s Byzantium poems? Good and great poetry lies all around us. Whether it comes to us over a car radio or in a heavily annotated textbook, it’s still poetry.
In a long-ago television interview I half remember, Berry described his songwriting method as entirely commercial. He studied the market and hit upon three common denominators for the mass (mostly white) teenage audience he aspired to reach: school, because school was the locus of teenage social life; cars, because teenagers in the car-crazy fifties and early sixties couldn’t wait to get the keys to the ignition in their hands; and love, because “everybody falls in love, or wants to fall in love.” Two things struck me about that interview – that Berry conceived of songwriting in terms more collective than subjective (the opposite tendency – I hurt! I suffer! I'm famous! – tends to be the norm in rock and roll); and that he had the delicacy to understand that while everybody wants to fall in love, some people never will. So in addition to his acuity and catholicity, I'd add another attribute to the list of Chuck Berry’s compositional distinctions: his humanity. That he himself, according to Keith Richards and others who have worked with him, has all the charm of a rattlesnake only adds to the poignancy of his lyrics. When I consider what Chuck Berry the man might have wanted to do with a sweet little sixteen-year-old girl (he says almost as much in his Autobiography, a book that does nothing to allay his reputation for sleaziness), the tender solicitude of that song seems even more remarkable:
Sweet Little Sixteen
She’s got the grownup blues
Tight dresses and lipstick
She’s sportin’ high-heeled shoes
Oh but tomorrow morning
She’ll have to change her trend
And be sweet sixteen
And back in class again.
Exactly: a sixteen-year-old girl is at once an innocent child and a sexual agent. This doubleness so disturbs us that we (meaning middle-aged men like me) tend to conceive of such a creature as childlike or provocative but not both. Well, sorry – this sixteen-year-old girl is hot as a volcano but still elicits all the paternal protectiveness the song bestows on her.
Note also that Sweet Little Sixteen isn’t “wearing” high-heeled shoes; she’s “sportin’” them. You could say that “sportin” is to “wearing” what poetry is to prose. Or you could say that it’s the right verb for the right line, providing the necessary linkage, as it were, between vehicle and tenor. Or you could say nothing at all and just dig it. I could no more define poetry than I could play guitar like Chuck Berry (I’ve tried – it’s harder than it looks), but I do know that the one thing all poetry must have is a love for language that ultimately transcends instrumentality. Words mean things, and the better the poem, the more meanings attach to the words, but in the way that painters fall in love with paint itself – pushing it, pulling it, scumbling it, scraping it – poets fall in love with words. Like any true poet, Berry has what James Schuyler, in “The Morning of the Poem,” called the “innate love of words,” the “sense of / How the thing said / Is in the words, how / The words are themselves / The thing said.” Given the poverty of the standard rock and roll lexicon, where words like “baby,” “love,” “run,” “hide,” “want,” “need,” “live,” “die,” and “bodacious” circulate with depressing regularity, the key words in Berry’s songs stand out as poems in themselves: “calaboose” for car in “No Particular Place To Go” or “hound” for Greyhound bus in “The Promised Land” or “motivatin’” for what might be described as “motoring joyfully but with determined purpose” in “Maybellene.” Those six books he read more than sufficed. Berry’s idiomatic exuberance derives not from the written word but from oral traditions in African American and even Southern white culture. No surprise that a black musician would draw on the structural template of the blues, but that the same musician would see the compatibility of blues structures with the narrative sense of country music – that sounds a bit like the birth of rock and roll, actually. (Elvis Presley made a similar discovery coming from the opposite direction.) The catalog of place names in the first verse of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” for instance, is echt-country, yet the song itself is as stolid a twelve-bar blues as any composition by, say, Willie Dixon, who, as a matter of fact, played bass on it. So where are they rockin’?
They’re really rockin’ in Boston
In Pittsburgh, PA
Deep in the heart of Texas
And round the ‘Frisco Bay
All over St. Louis
And down in New Orleans
All the cats want to dance with
Sweet Little Sixteen.
You could draw a pretty comprehensive map of America from the poetry of place names in Chuck Berry’s songs. Norfolk Virginia, downtown Birmingham, Houston town, Albuquerque, Los Angeles: they’re all there in “The Promised Land,” inventoried with great good humor even when the traveler encounters, as we all do from time to time, “motor trouble that turned into a struggle.” Wouldn’t “The Promised Land” make a better national anthem than that unsingable and bellicose dirge we’re stuck with?
I left my home in Norfolk Virginia
California on my mind
I straddled that Greyhound and rode him into Raleigh
And on across Caroline . . .
Workin’ on a T-bone steak a la carte
Flying’ over to the Golden State
When the pilot told us in thirteen minutes
He would set us at the terminal gate.
Swing low chariot, come down easy
Taxi to the terminal zone
Cut your engines and cool your wings
And let me make it to the telephone.
Los Angeles give me Norfolk Virginia
Tidewater 4-10-0-9
Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin’
And the poor boy’s on the line.
Now, some people might suspect the motive of a songwriter who could write such a paean to place when the place in question subjected him to constant racial harassment. But Berry never concealed his motive – to make as much money as possible. How American is that? That a man who had every reason to begrudge his country could write “The Promised Land” or the even more besotted “Living in the USA” (“Looking hard for a drive-in, searching for a corner café . . . / Yeah, and the juke box jumping with records like in the USA”) is, for me, cause for the profoundest patriotism. Furthermore, unlike “This Land Is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie’s national anthem of Depression-era populism, “The Promised Land” doesn’t ask that you hate the rich or share the singer’s sectarian politics. (Listen to the rarely sung verses four and five if you don’t believe me.) I do hate the rich, but that’s because I'm not as generous of spirit as Chuck Berry is. All that “The Promised Land” and “Living in the USA” ask of you is that you love American place names, not be a complete stiff, and maybe appreciate a “rare hamburger sizzling on an open grill night and day.”
Although the right word is ideally a poem in itself, you still have to put one next to another. This too Berry does with masterly efficiency. The way his words roll off the tongue in “Tulane” and “Downbound Train” and so many others turns language into music – a useful quality for a body of songs not known for their melodic invention. (Let’s face it, Chuck’s thing is rhythm, not melody.) Most pop song lyrics don’t scan on the page and don’t need to, but sometimes Berry’s compositional regularity requires the assistance of some classical versification, as in the giddy triple meters of “School Days”:
Up in the /morning and / out to school
The teacher / is teaching / the golden / rule
Ameri/can his’try / and practi/cal math
You study / ‘em hard and / hopin’ to / pass
Workin’ your / fingers right / down to the / bone
The guy / behind you / won’t leave you / alone
Ring ring / goes the bell
The cook in / the lunch room’s / ready to / sell
You’re lucky / if you / can find / a seat
You’re for/tunate if / you have time / to eat
Back in the / classroom op/en your books
Gee but the / teacher don’t / know
How mean / she looks.
No, Berry probably didn’t know he was using anapestic, dactylic, and amphibrachic feet, but neither, I suspect, did the anonymous author of “There Once Was a Man from Nantucket,” and he (or she) was a genius too.
Chuck Berry has had a hard life: reform school, two prison terms, financial exploitation, bankruptcy, racial discrimination, and much else. It is not his manner to rehearse his private grief in public, though the sly braggadocio of “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” and the crypto-autobiography of “Johnny B. Goode” trade playfully on his public image. Whether the pathos of “Memphis, Tennessee” derives from his own domestic sorrows is, strictly speaking, beside the point, though in a song this tender and touching, no supposition seems entirely extraneous. At any rate, “Memphis, Tennessee” is one of the greatest story songs in American music, all the more affecting for being so offhand and bouncy. (Berry himself, so he says in his Autobiography, played the swooping bass and “the ticky-tack drums that trot along in the background.”) What appears on first listening to be just another comic ditty about frustrated pedophilia (or so I used to interpret the top-forty version by Johnny Rivers that I knew as a child) turns out to be the desperate plea of a divorced father barred from any contact with his six-year-old daughter. The narrative builds to its final revelation piece by piece, with incidental details carrying an emotional load too freighted to be acknowledged outright: that the girl is furtively trying to reach her father; that the father has taken refuge with relatives; that although he now lives in the sort of place where messages are written on the wall, he once lived in a house high on a ridge overlooking the river; that the girl’s mother, not he, has broken up the family. And all of this – the heartbreak, the loss, the wit – by way of a conversation with a telephone operator:
Long distance information, give me Memphis Tennessee
Help me find the party trying to get in touch with me
She could not leave her number but I know who placed the call
‘Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall . . .
Last time I saw Marie she’s waving me goodbye
With hurry home drops on her cheeks that trickled from her eye
Marie is only six years old, information please
Try to put me through to her in Memphis Tennessee.
Berry’s take on the song in his Autobiography may seem naïve, but to me it sounds like the very definition of classicism: “The situation in the story was intended to have a wide scope of interest to the general public rather than a rare or particular incidental occurrence that would entreat the memory of only a few. Such a portrayal of popular or general situations and conditions in lyrics has always been my greatest objective in writing.” Add a “sir” and complicate the syntax a bit, and this could be Dr. Johnson speaking to Boswell or Sir Joshua Reynolds. Although “Memphis, Tennessee” addresses a more adult audience than Berry’s more typical ballads of teenage life, even the ballads of teenage life are classicist: we were all teenagers once and we have all fallen, or (to observe Berry’s astute qualification) want to fall, in love.
Blues, country and western, Johnsonian neoclassicism: these are the traditions that nurture Chuck Berry’s lyrical art. But really, who gives a damn about the categories when you’re listening to something as smoking as “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”? Many critics have taken this song to be a pointed avowal of black pride (not exactly a safe career move in 1956), and since the songwriter himself is unquestionably a brown eyed handsome man, blackness (or brownness) is very much to the point. In fact, the opening lines – “Arrested on charges of unemployment / He was sitting in the witness stand” – call to mind all too clearly the sort of harassment that black Americans have had to endure. But there’s that classicism again – all women, everywhere, have been falling for a certain kind of handsomeness “Way back in history three thousand years / In fact ever since the world began.” This would include the Venus de Milo (here reimagined as a modern girl named Milo Venus) who, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is “No more, but e’en a woman.” Why should it be any different for her than for the judge’s wife in the first verse who “called up the district attorney / She said you free that brown eyed man / If you want your job you better free that brown eyed man”? Never, it seems to me, has the universalizing tendency of classicism been more cogently expressed:
Milo Venus was a beautiful lass
She had the world in the palm of her hand
She lost both her arms in a wrasslin’ match
To get a brown eyed handsome man
She fought and won herself a brown eyed handsome man.
Robert Christgau, in Grown Up All Wrong, wrote that Chuck Berry “was one of the ones to make us understand that the greatest thing about art is the way it happens among people.” Berry himself makes no such claims. He really seems to believe that compared to a transcendent “artist” like Joan Crawford, who “will go down in the history books of even Russia, China, and Arabia,” he is a mere satellite, “circl[ing] a few years in the foreign magazines and then fad[ing] away in the next conventional war.” Far from being a “star,” he merely has a job to do and a check to pick up. Although Berry’s underestimation of his own talent seems incomprehensible, it did save him (and us) from the windy grandiloquence of songs like “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Anyway, it’s a refreshing twist – the rock auteur who, for once, doesn’t think he’s a genius.
For people of my parents’ generation, rock songwriting seemed a paltry thing, and they certainly would have believed that Chuck Berry lacked anything like the sophistication of Ira Gershwin or Cole Porter. That may be. But I didn’t grow up with Broadway musicals, I grew up with rock and roll, and it is to that happily debased art form that I owe my first exposure to poetry. Before rock and pop lyrics in the late sixties and early seventies turned to the outer reaches of narcissism (gloriously exemplified by Joni Mitchell and John Lennon, among others), they tended to follow in the more impersonal and commercial lines laid down by Berry and that he too was following from lines laid down by Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, and others. I will concede that, lyrically, Brian Wilson was no match for Lorenz Hart, but the Beach Boys got to me first, and when I was ten years old the perfect couplets of “I Get Around” conjured up a world as glamorously ritualized and unreal as the Arthurian romances, which I read avidly in those days but found a tad pale by comparison:
I'm getting’ bugged driving up and down this same old strip
I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip
My buddies and me are getting real well known
Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone.
It was like first looking into Chapman’s Homer. Language (and not just Wilson’s superb compositions and the band’s gorgeous harmonies) had revealed to me a world more beautiful and desirable than the one I lived in, even if I dimly perceived that no such world could possibly exist. (It sure didn’t exist for Brian Wilson and his brothers, whose hellish upbringing in what looked like a picture perfect California household went unmentioned in their songs.) Not every song, not even every Beach Boy song, held such wonders. Even then a catchy chorus and flashy guitar break served to deflect attention from the nullity of the lyrics. Anyway, if the song was as great as “Be My Baby” or “Louie Louie,” who could complain? Yet as an unprecocious child I had heard enough real poetry in the songs of the Beach Boys and Smokey Robinson and Chuck Berry (usually in cover versions by later bands) to know that words could be more than functional. When, a few years later, pop musicians were suddenly writing lines like “Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it just to reach you, Julia,” I was ready. If this more inward approach sacrificed some of the charm and playfulness of the Chuck Berry/Beach Boys/Smokey Robinson manner, it offered instead audacious explorations of the self and the permutations of consciousness. I'd call that a pretty fair trade-off.
So I owe a lot to rock and roll lyricists. I wouldn’t necessarily say no John Milton without Chuck Berry, but in my case the great songwriters like Berry helped me do some of the necessary prep work. They helped me to love language. And if there were more sophisticated lyricists before Berry, there have been more sophisticated lyricists since Berry. By now the proposition that certain rock and pop songwriters have achieved depths of feeling comparable to the best poetry isn’t even controversial. Ray Davies, Shane MacGowan, Randy Newman, Lucinda Williams, Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, Morrissey, and many others – some working in a more confessional, others in a more impersonal tradition, and others making any such distinction ultimately meaningless – have all written songs that do what all good poetry does: moves, enlightens, disturbs, delights. Yet it all had to start somewhere, and in rock and roll, much of the greatest lyric writing started with Chuck Berry. (As for the basic musical D.N.A. of rock and roll, Berry pretty much created that too.) He could have said, as many rockers would have, knowing that the music would do most of the work, “Let’s go for a ride in my car, baby.” He didn’t. He said, “Climb into my machine so we can cruise on out.”

R.I.P. Trayvon, that nigga look just like me
-Frank Ocean, “Nikes”
That looks like a bad dude …
-A Tulsa police officer, on the body of Terence Crutcher1.
I can’t stop thinking about the video footage shot from above the highway where Terence Crutcher died in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you watch the footage, you’ll see the 40-year-old man walk away from officers with his hands up before Officer Betty Shelby shoots him dead. But what we see isn’t what echoes for me -- it’s what we hear. If you listen you’ll hear one of two officers in the helicopter (one of whom was Officer David Shelby, husband to Betty Shelby) authorize Crutcher’s death moments before Crutcher crumples to the ground. Pronouncing, “That” -- this is a human being he’s referring to -- “looks like a bad dude,” he renders Crutcher a threat in the absence of any evidence outside his body.
These words echo for me because in the footage their effect approaches something like magic. The officer observes, and moments later Crutcher is dead. It’s too perfect -- much too perfect -- an illustration of how preconceptions about black people begin with the visual, with assumptions about our bodies: how we move through space, the way we cast our eyes at others, our affect, and on and on. It’s too perfect an illustration of how assumptions emanating from the visual field produce physical ramifications, how they structure and are structured by racist fictions about what our bodies mean.
2.
There are three covers for Frank Ocean’s latest album, Blonde, all of which present black men flinching from our vision into various anonymities. One shows us a man disappearing behind weed smoke’s dense haze; the second presents another man (perhaps Ocean himself) ensconced in a motorcycle helmet’s hermetic safety. The third interests me most: it depicts the crooner standing in front of spotless white tile. He’s shirtless, so that we get to peer in on his slender, muscular body, but his hair is dyed green in a Stroop-inspired taunt. He obscures his face with a bandaged hand, beneath which you can make out his furrowed brow, suggestive of a grimace or weeping. Meanwhile, his hand, upper body, and forehead are beaded with water or perspiration.
Of all Blonde’s covers, this one most recalls the album’s original title, Boys Don’t Cry. Ocean dropped that title upon the album’s release, but when I look at this image of him soaked and covering his grief like Masaccio’sAdam leaving the Garden, I can’t help but hear that former title’s echo. It draws our attention to the precarious relationship between the normative gender assumptions that shape our conceptions of masculinity, and the reality of emotional vulnerability that those notions elide. Ocean’s obscured visage bespeaks the tension between the image of the black male body -- a cluster of signifiers to which so many meanings attach that we hardly see it at all -- and the emotional intricacy underlying these ossified stereotypes.
Amidst another cycle of renewed attention to police violence against black bodies, I’ve come to think that Ocean’s cover suggests possibilities for more nuanced portrayals of black masculinity and emotion than those that currently pervade our national consciousness. Every death of a police-shooting victim underlines the state of hypervisibility in which the black body exists. For black men, this means that a certain fiction is always preceding our bodies, walking ahead of us into rooms, intimidating people on sidewalks, and speaking for us before we can open our mouths.
As Nicole Fleetwood observes in Troubling Vision, this fiction imbues us “with a mythic sense of virility, danger, and physicality.” I take Fleetwood to mean that in America’s cultural imagination, the black male body always signifies as an existential threat, one characterized by predatory violence, hyper-sexuality, and overwhelming physical force. This will be true no matter what we do to attenuate the nervous unease that crowds us. We’re always already hollowed out, reduced to receptacles in which the nation’s most basic fears circulate.
Blonde’s cover short-circuits these assumptions, creates a tear in the visual field that unsettles received notions that black masculinity is legible, easy reading for whoever might chance upon it. Consider his green hair: it employs the Stroop effect to taunt us via a textual-visual misdirect so that seeing and reading are sundered from one another. (In another slight at legibility, the album title is stylized as “blond” on the cover, though the official title is Blonde.) Ocean’s hair reshuffles our expectations before we hear a note of music, demanding that we dedicate renewed attention to an image we thought we knew. It’s an emphatic reassertion, a warning that with Ocean, what you see will not be what you get.
Then there’s that hand, raised to hide an emotional turmoil that, according to the script, shouldn’t exist at all. In We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, bell hooks writes that in order to compensate for the structural violence wielded against them, black men are taught “to believe that a real male is fearless, insensitive, egocentric, and invulnerable” and thus adopt a “cool pose” (emphasis mine). This is a masculinist posture that rejects emotional vulnerability -- and interiority in general -- as inimical to manhood. Hip-hop’s visual codes and genre conventions often reinforce this posture, with the effect of embracing and heightening the fictions foisted upon us by white supremacy’s image repertoire. In Hip-Hop Wars, Tricia Rose argues that contemporary rap’s calling cards have become “distorted, antisocial, self-destructive, and violent portrayals of black masculinity” along with rampant misogyny and homophobia. The cool pose instantiates the representational straitjacket against which black men struggle.
I’m not certain that I can accept hooks and Rose’s assertions uncritically, but that’s for another essay. But if we receive them as true, Ocean’s cover flouts the cool pose in favor of emotional vulnerability, insisting on depth in the face of a dyad that reduces black men to surface. Ocean’s damaged hand is raised in an attempt to enact the earlier album title’s dictum -- boys don’t cry, remember? -- but it’s a futile act; the gesture only displaces his grief so that his tears reappear in the visual field as the moisture beading his body, each tear a tear in his cool pose. Here, feeling and vulnerability are irreducible no matter what pose we might strike in order to hide it. Call it a new law: the Conservation of Feeling. This hand also blocks us, creates an opacity to stump a presumed transparency. The overall effect is a reinsertion of interiority into a body that had been hollowed.
3.
How does this sound?
On Blonde, what we hear is a struggle between the masculinist conventions of contemporary hip-hop and Ocean’s assertion of a queered black masculinity, two images of black manhood jockeying for position in one aural space. It’s a drama not unlike the one Ocean presents on the album cover, and if you listen you’ll hear the tears in hip-hop’s cool pose. Take the first track on the album, “Nikes”:
These bitches want Nikes
They looking for a check
Tell ‘em it ain’t likely
Said she need a ring like Carmelo
Must be on that white like Othello
Ocean cycles through some of contemporary hip-hop’s most enduring tropes with impressive dexterity: he plays a vigilantly unattached bachelor weary of commitment and manipulative women, works in references to cocaine and sneakers, and name checks an NBA star. It’s a masterful display of Ocean’s facility with the genre’s conventions after a four-year absence, and like most good hip-hop these days, the verse is deeply boring but also hilarious in the way that Ocean breathes life into tired tropes via inspired wordplay. (Will there be a better couplet written this year than “Said she need a ring like Carmelo/Must be on that white like Othello”? Probably not.) The verse also initiates the album in a moment of dissonance: after seeing Ocean embrace queerness not just as an identity but also as a political orientation, it is jarring to hear him turn to the cool pose’s rhetoric.
But this rhetoric’s cool surface has a conspicuous tear in its fabric. After all, Ocean sings the song’s first three minutes through a distorted filter, sounding as if he inhaled helium before running his vocals through autotune. At times he howls and whoops rather than sings, and if we didn’t know who the singer was, it would be impossible to assign Ocean a gender. Reverb doubles his voice, heightening its alien quality. A lone, woozy synth that approximates a Theremin runs the song’s length; behind the synth, constant vibrato makes the song’s bass line sound weirdly distended. It sounds like we’ve been stranded in some unfamiliar space. The queer quality of this defamiliarization becomes apparent in the song’s video, which features shots of Ocean sporting eyeliner, suggestively palming a gearshift, and pantomiming fellatio.
Later, he stands alone on a stage, garbed in a white jumpsuit, eyes closed in private reverie, glitter sprinkled upon his face.
Ocean shows us a queer black male body, conspicuous in its refusal to be forced into the kind of hypervisibility that allowed police officers to condemn Terence Crutcher as a “bad dude” on sight. The effect is a defamiliarization of those familiar tropes associated with a toxic masculinity.
This is why I find the beginning of “Nikes” ’ second verse so compelling. Leaving behind the cool pose, Ocean mourns for some fallen black men: A$AP Yams, the New York producer who passed away earlier this year; Pimp C, the Texas rapper whose ghost has haunted hip-hop this year; and Trayvon Martin. When I first heard Trayvon’s name mentioned in company of Yams and Pimp C, I was confused. What did he have to do with these two artists who performed a certain vision of the black male body?
But now I see that including Trayvon in that pantheon constitutes a refusal and an expansion: black masculinity can look like Yams and Pimp C, yes. It can also look like the face of this boy, whose body was read as thuggish and dangerous for no other reason than his blackness. By inserting Trayvon Martin into this list, Ocean asserts the elasticity of black maleness. If Trayvon looks like Ocean, then he also embodies the alterity Ocean foregrounds in this song and video, the possibility of “otherwise,” as Ashon Crawley might say. When that lyric arrives in the video, Ocean holds the ubiquitous self-portrait of Trayvon staring out from beneath a white hood. This image circulated relentlessly in the aftermath of his murder, and public as it has become, we might be tempted into thinking that we know it. Ocean demands that we look again.